I would definitely recommend serving one set of pages (same URLs) with variable language depending on user preference. You can “guess” their preference from a browser user-agent string, but you should always show the user a choice, in case their browser is in a different country than their brain. Because I am arguing for one set of URLs (to make Google happy) this means that my recommendation requires a CMS of some sort.
It doesn’t have to be a full-on CMS with all your data in a database, but it does mean you need a server-side scripting language to interrogate the browser and cookies, and substitute the appropriate content.
Long ago, when I built the Softpress Web site (really long ago), I had separate content sections that I built up using PHP and Freeway-generated page “fragments”. Using the PHP Make Insert Page Action, I was able to strip off the head and HTML tags, leaving only the content of the body. This demanded a fairly rigorous approach to styles, so it’s not for everyone, but it allowed me complete control over the assembly of the pages, and let me use global navigation with one “smart” file, as well as other tricks. It let me thread static and dynamic content (from the store) into the same site, with consistent URLs throughout. Nowadays, I would probably just put all the content in a database, but the JavaScript content editing widgets are better now than they were in 2003. Using the static fragments approach meant that I could have highly-designed “only possible in Freeway” pages and a full content-management system without bending my brain too much.
Walter
On Jul 2, 2017, at 10:19 AM, grantsymon email@hidden wrote:
I came to FW because my site needed to be in 2 languages and the Master page solution seemed to help a lot with that, although in the end, I’ve made a Master for each language. (Would love to see a future version of FW with pages able to draw down items from more than one Master).
I may be building a new site from scratch and I’m wondering if there are better ways of dealing with multiple languages? For instance, would it be better in these days of Responsive sites, to have some kind of CMS with content negotiations or something?
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